


Face The Bafflement (Doctor Who, "Face the Raven")

by PlaidAdder



Series: Doctor Who Meta [11]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Face the Raven, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 05:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5278088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So the last four weeks have been:</p><p>1) The Zygon two-parter, which I am still planning to write up when I get the time, but let me just say that although I was at times entertained by both episodes, that doesn’t balance out the massive problems built into the whole premise.</p><p>2) Giant dust creatures made of sleepy sand from the corners of a million eyes kill everyone. Or maybe they don’t. It’s hard to say. It’s really hard to say exactly what happened in that episode, except that the Doctor never said a truer thing than “None of this makes any sense.”</p><p>3) And now…an episode set in Diagon Alley.</p><p>Let me just say, before venturing into the spoilers below, that given that some pretty significant shit goes down in this episode..they sure made some weird choices about how to do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Face The Bafflement (Doctor Who, "Face the Raven")

 

OK, if you have followed me down there then you presumably know that this is the episode in which Clara dies. Now I have actually seen all of New Who now, yes, even seasons 7 and 8, and so I have seen my share of companion exits, and if you would like to know what I thought of them you can go read [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1138566). I have loved some of them; I have hated some of them; some of them were just fucking NOT OK. (Well. One of them. [You know which one I’m talking about](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/61744770006/plaidder-objects-to-journeys-end-a).) But I have never seen one as…fucking…BAFFLING as this one.

Clara is not my favorite companion. I will tell you that for free. I just could not invest in the Impossible Girl. Blame it on my being old and curmudgeonly; but she just never seemed as fully present to me, as a character, as Rose or Martha or Donna or even Amy and Rory. All the same, though…when you’re sending off a companion who’s been running around for three seasons–a companion who’s seen him through a regeneration, and to whom the Doctor quite often appears to have an irrationally intense attachment that just always seemed really out of proportion to me–you should make it nice. You should give the actress some memorable work to do. You should give the character some moments of ass-kicking. You want at least one emotionally intense scene with the Doctor. You want her to go out with a bang, having written her name amongst the stars.

None of that happened in this episode.

All that time they spend in season 8 developing Clara as a real character with an autonomous will and an independent intelligence and a non-Doctor-centric love life…and OK, season 9 wasn’t good at sustaining any of that, but still, it happened…and then Clara dies because of a stupid mistake that she makes, in the anticlimax of a bizarrely plotless and static episode which appears to have been shot on a set they scavenged from  _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone_. Was any of that supposed to be sinister or scary? Because it failed. It failed repeatedly and sadly and miserably. I mean they put a raven in a cage and tried to scare us with it, for Christ’s sake.

Half the episode was spent playing with maps and dangling out of the TARDIS, and then the other half consisted largely of people standing around wondering what was going on. The plot built around Clara’s death was about as low-stakes, emotionally, as it could possibly have been. Of all the people that could have been used to bait Ascildir’s little Doctor trap, they chose Rigsy? Dude, I saw Season 8 not that long ago; I even liked “Flatliners;” and I had to look Rigsy up on IMDB before I remembered who he was. Despite the spectral countdown, there was no sense of urgency. The demonstration of how the quantum shade raven death system works took forever and required characters who are normally quite assertive and interventionist to just stand there staring while someone was killed before their eyes. This weird passivity carries through into the scene in which everyone discovers that Clara is going to die. The Doctor appears to come to life briefly while threatening to rain down hell on Ascildir. But otherwise…I mean I am actually all about less is more acting, but as far as Capaldi’s performance in the goodbye scenes, less really seemed like less to me. Clara was more upset after “Kill the Moon” than she was to learn of her upcoming demise. I get that she wants to be brave, and that maybe somehow this is all about never having really gotten over Danny Pink, who is FINALLY mentioned in this episode; but still, a few moments of her losing her shit before she manages to keep it together would have made all the difference. 

In some ways this is just a particularly extreme example of a common writing problem: because Dollard knows that the point of this episode is to kill Clara, she doesn't let the characters fight it. It's as if they all went into this episode knowing she was going to die and there would be nothing they could do about it. It's been established that you can pass the 'quantum shade' on to another person if that person agrees. So why is there no discussion of Clara passing the quantum shade on to someone else? Obviously not Rigsy...but she is standing there with two people who are essentially immortal, both of whom claim to be broken up by Clara's impending demise, and neither Ascildir nor the Doctor offers to take the thing on. The Doctor might have got through this with nothing worse than a regeneration; who knows what would have happened to Ascildir, because really, her immortality makes no fucking sense so it's impossible to predict how it would work. Or maybe there's some reason that the Doctor couldn't take it on for her; but fine, explain that. It's just bizarre that the Doctor either never thinks of offering to take Clara's death on, or thinks of it but never brings it up. That would have been a perfect opportunity, actually, to develop the only thing that would have made everyone's weird resignation in the Face of the Raven make sense: Clara's recognition of her risk-taking as the expression of a death wish which she is now affirmatively embracing. That is something you could have sold, if season 9 had ever dealt with the emotional repercussions of Danny Pink's death at the end of season 8. Then the staging of the death is very awkward; she tells him she wants to do it alone, he follows her but stays behind her so that his presence there is completely useless to her from an emotional point of view, she dies and he doesn't even go over to touch her artistically arranged body. Dude, what are you doing out there if you're not going to at least hold her hand, or catch her as she falls? Why are you just hanging out in the shadows like a creep?

I guess it comes down to something I remember saying after I started watching season 8: I like Capaldi’s Doctor and I sort of like the new improved Clara, but I don’t actually like them together. They’re all right with the sparks-fly bantering stuff, but the deep emotional connection just doesn’t seem to be there–or at least it was not evident during Clara’s last moments. It just did not feel real to me, emotionally, at all; and so when Clara gets hit with the raven and collapses on the cobbles, I really just felt nothing. This despite the fact that they shot the death from three different angles, in slow motion.

I just don’t get it at all. Why could they not do a better job with this? I mean a companion only gets one heartwrenching exit (well, OK, Rose got two). Don’t fucking WASTE it on this lame Edgar Allan Poe bullshit! What is the MATTER with you?


End file.
